Tuesday 12 March 2013

Lone Wolf and The Ice Halls of Terror (Commodore 64, 1985)

The first Lone Wolf Gamebook I have ever read was The Caverns of Kalte and I always wanted to see a videogame porting of one the best chapters of LF Saga. Unfortunately, even if a game was planned (HCP for C64 & ZX Spectrum), it never actually happened and the only official visual is represented by the advertisement below.

Computer Gamer, Advertisement, 1985

The advertising above, even if visually interesting, it wasn't revealing anything about the game itself. Luckily I managed to find a more accurate ad appeared on the Lone Wolf Club Newsletters (Summer Special 1985). 


Lone Wolf Club Newsletter, Summer Special 1985

The promise was quite inviting: 3D animation and graphics, unique combat system and multidimensional plot lines (?); the possibility to order the game was a quite unusual choice especially when probably neither a playable preview nor a demo was available. Anyway a small note at the bottom of the page was remarking that almost 30 days were needed for the delivery. What happened to this title so? 

Time for more digging. 

And yes, here's my copy of Caverns of Kalte. 



Note.
One thing I've discovered reading the English version of the Gamebook, was that for unknown reasons, in the Italian version, Vonotar (the main villain of Kalte) was renamed as Vonatar. A (repeated) typo or just a phonetic choice? Who knows why.

7 comments:

  1. Shame that it was no released for the C64. At 1985 it would became a classic, undoubtedly !!!!!!
    ¿Exists the Zx version?

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    Replies
    1. Same for the Spectrum version: announced but never released. I even tried to contact Jon Hare to check if he has even just a picture of a demo version, but I had no luck so far.

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  2. I can help you with the italian spelling of "Vonotar".

    In the italian translation of Lone Wolf books many changes were made to the names in the game, in order to let them sound better in for italian readers.

    I'm listing some examples:

    Kai Knights -> Cavalieri RAMAS
    Vonotar -> Vonatar
    Barraka - >Bakkarshan
    Laumspur -> Vigorilla
    Kalte - > Kaltenland
    Gwynian -> Gunian

    And so on. So, there were no typo.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the specification Andrea. Very interesting.

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  3. Hello, could I share these images in a website I help to be the main gamebook databasis in the world? I put your name and your blog link to divulgate them. Cheers, Pedro.

    ReplyDelete